1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a zoom lens utilizing inner focus system and more particularly to a zoom lens including focusing lens groups which are small in size and light in weight and which are well suited for automatic focusing.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The focusing methods of known zoom lenses have been generally so designed that of all the lens groups, the lens group closest to the object side is moved out to effect the focusing. Presently, this method has been used chiefly with the existing zoom lenses owing to the fact that the lens barrel construction can be made relatively simple and moreover the focusing can be effected through substantially a given amount of movement over the whole zooming range with an object at the same distance.
However, generally the most-object-side lens of the zoom lens requires the largest diameter and therefore it tends to be largest in weight. Therefore, where the most-object-side lens group is moved as a focusing group, there are disadvantages such as a problem of weight balance and deterioration of the performance due to flexture, whereas if it is used for automatic focusing purposes, not only the focusing speed is decreased but also the load on the focusing motor is increased.
As a result, recently there has existed a demand for reduction in the weight of the focusing group and various focusing methods have been proposed in known literatures including Japanese Laid-Open Patents No. 52-109952, No. 56-21112 and No. 59-33418.
In the zoom lens described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent No. 52-109952, the most-object-side, large-diameter lens group is divided into three parts so as to use the resulting intermediate lenses as a focusing group and therefore there are disadvantages that not only the lens diameter is increased and there is less possibility of remarkably decreasing the weight of the focusing group but also the number of the lenses in the group is increased and the weight balance of the lens on the whole is deteriorated. Also, in the zoom lens disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent No. 56-21112, the number of the constituting lenses of the focusing group is large as compared with its diameter thus failing to serve the effect of reducing the weight. Moreover, this focusing system has the disadvantage of lacking versatility in that it is limited to the zoom lenses whose lens type is the four group construction and including an afocal portion and it has no versatility. On the other hand, Japanese Laid-Open Patent No. 59-33418 discloses a zoom lens so designed that the focusing is effected by using a part of the most-image-side fixed imaging lens group as a focusing lens group and therefore, while the focusing group is reduced in diameter and in the number of the constituting lenses with the resulting reduction in weight, in the case of an object at the same distance variation in the amount of movement is increased with shift from the wide-angle range to the telephoto range with the result that the air spacing required for this purpose must be ensured thus increasing the whole length of the lens.